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Newsday (New York)
March 21, 2000, Tuesday
WRITING IS THE EASY PART WHEN IT COMES TO COVERING HUMAN TRAGEDY
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Chokwe, Mozambique _ WE HADN'T BEEN walking more than five minutes when the unmistakable, stomach-turning smell of a decaying corpse hit us. I looked around for the hidden body-for the log that suddenly develops a face, for the soggy leaves that hide the twisted limbs, for the fingers sticking out of the mud. Nothing. Then I looked down at my feet, at a pile of branches stacked beside a trickle of water where a man sat silently washing a pink ceramic dog.
"That's a body!" I said to my colleague, backing away from the sticks. " No, it's not," he said with the weary tone of someone who has seen too many corpses in his career. "Well, it smells like a body, and it's got two legs like a body," I insisted, peering more closely at the mound. "Oh, yeah, I guess it is," my now-convinced colleague replied, and he took a photograph of the unfortunate flood victim in this macabre resting place.
I've seen thousands of dead bodies in my 10 years covering Africa, but rarely have they startled me as this one did, surrounded as it was by people who went about their daily chores, washing their clothes and their household ornaments, as if it were completely normal to have a corpse placed like a covered pot roast in the middle of the street where they live.
Disasters bring out the best, the worst and the weirdest in people, which is why they are such compelling stories to read and to write about. In the floods that swamped southern Mozambique, the best were the South African soldiers who hovered inches above the water in their helicopters and patiently hoisted thousands of terrified people from trees, roofs and rushing currents to safety. The worst were the profiteers who tripled the price of cold drinks in towns that had virtually no food or drinking water and who charged penniless flood victims to be carried piggyback through waist-high water to land. The weirdest, without doubt, was the man with his pink ceramic dog, either unaware of the stench beside him or so accustomed to it that he no longer noticed.
I covered my first catastrophe in 1985, when, barely into my first journalism job, I was sent to report on the Mexico City earthquake. I knew about four words of Spanish, but they worked well under the circumstances: ?Donde esta? (Where is?) and ?Cuantos muertos? (How many dead?) The disasters and wars haven't stopped since: Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zaire, Sudan, Angola, the Nairobi embassy bombing and now Mozambique, where the rivers burst their banks Feb. 27 and turned the southern part of the country into a lake.
There are certain things you learn quickly about covering disasters. First you pack the heavy boots. Then the cables-one for the cell phone, one for the satellite phone, one for a regular phone, one to connect the laptop to each, and backups for all if possible. Then the adapters-two- pronged, three- pronged, round holes, rectangular holes and triangles. You never know what you'll find on the hotel walls. You learn to eat when you get the chance, and never to exit a helicopter toward the back, where the tail rotor is whirring at invisibly fast speeds.
You learn to treat everyone you come across, from the flood victim standing knee- deep in putrid water to the helicopter pilot, with respect. The pilot may be your only lift out of the catastrophe, and the flood victim may be your only friend if you miss the flight.
When it comes to covering human tragedy, writing is the easy part. The victims' faces and anguished gestures tell their stories, even if their words spill out in a language you do not understand. You don't need to ask many questions of someone who crouches silently on the floor of a helicopter after being hooked to the end of a metal cable and hauled from the top of a snake-infested tree where they have been stranded days without food or sleep. You don't need anyone to tell you the terror that must have gone through the twisted mind of the deranged man whose relatives normally kept him chained down and who forgot to free him as they fled the floods. A week later, they returned to find his corpse floating in the receding waters, still on its chain.
The difficult part is getting to the tragedy. When the world accuses the media of ignoring a catastrophe, rarely is the reason a lack of interest. More likely, it is logistics. As logistical nightmares go, Mozambique ranked among the worst.
Imagine wandering onto a crowded airfield, dodging rotor blades and being deafened by the roar of jet engines, and begging your way onto a flying machine that will take you to one of the worst places on Earth, where there is no food, no drinkable water, no hotel and bodies submerged in the mud that envelops your feet. Imagine getting off on the other end, watching your ride fly away and knowing that in addition to doing your work you must somehow organize a way back to the capital so you can write and send your story. Imagine knowing that if you don't time it exactly right-getting to the airstrip just as a helicopter is leaving and persuading the pilot to take you away- you face the prospect of being stranded in this hellhole for the night and being bitten raw by malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
IN MOZAMBIQUE, where floods had washed out the major roads and bridges, helicopters were the only means of reaching the heart of the story. Only from a few hundred feet above could you appreciate the astounding breadth of the floods and the plight of the stranded victims, who would wave their arms and red cloths from their treetop perches to attract rescuers' attention. Only from the air could you comprehend the wrenching plight of these Mozambicans, most of them small farmers, who were forced to leave their precious cows and sheep and pigs, many of the animals wailing in terror, stranded on tiny strips of land as they were flown to safety. And it was only by helicopter that you could reach the refugee camps where the victims, clutching their soggy bundles of belongings, were crammed in conditions that had little to offer other than being above water.
Disasters are great equalizers. There is no class distinction in a refugee camp or in a ruined city, where everyone is penniless and homeless. In a refugee camp one day I encountered a Mozambican who spoke fluent English. He lamented the fact that his nice house had been destroyed, all his belongings ruined, his car buried in mud and his personal documents lost. I pondered whether to write about him-after all, he was downright rich compared to most people here and wasn't exactly the typical impoverished, illiterate flood victim. In the end, though, I did write about him, because despite his perfect English and clearly superior education, he was now just like the shriveled old women and filthy, hungry children milling around him. Whatever advantages he had in the past, they had not been enough to spare him this misfortune.
All of us have our particular moments when we witness something or meet someone or hear of some incident that forever haunts us. In Mozambique, for me, there were two: it was the thought of the chained man realizing his dreadful fate and the bizarre story of a TV correspondent standing on a small spit of land and being constantly interrupted by the mooing of a cow as he tried to speak into the camera. He and his colleagues scanned their watery surroundings but saw nothing, yet still the frightened cries came. Finally, they spotted a pair of nostrils poking up through the water, all that was visible of the slowly drowning animal. They tried to guide the animal to safety by prodding it with a long stick, but it panicked and vanished below the surface, just a few feet from safety.
EACH TIME my colleagues and I return home from covering such a story, we face similar questions from our friends and family, often delivered in an accusatory tone: How do you handle the emotional side of witnessing human tragedy on such a massive scale? How do you sleep at night knowing that the woman you interviewed two hours earlier might be dead now? How do you sit down to a sumptuous dinner when a few hours before you were slogging through filthy, ankle-deep water and nearly tripping over a corpse?
The truth: For most of us, it's not that difficult. If it were, we would have gotten out of this business years ago. For all the horror and misery we witness, we know that it is only by writing about it, filming it, photographing it and then showing it to the world that anyone will do anything to help.
Newsday (New York)
March 3, 2000, Friday
A RIVER OF WOES / HERE, RESCUERS' JOB IS NEVER FINISHED
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Chibuto, Mozambique -There's no telling where the river begins or ends. There's no way to know where the roads once meandered, where the animals once grazed, where the children went to school and where their parents gathered for the evening meal.
There is only an endless expanse of coffee-colored water oozing through southern Mozambique, burying towns and leaving visible only the tips of dwellings and the tops of trees, many with people clinging to them. Since the Limpopo River poured over its banks five days ago following several days of unprecedented rain, much of this country has been swallowed, and its people have been reduced to living in branches until help arrives.
"I take my hat off to them, staying for so long in a tree and not being able to go anywhere," a South African military helicopter pilot, A.P. Smith, said yesterday as he prepared to fly the latest of countless search and rescue missions his country has been leading since Mozambique cried for help. "The worst part of this area is that it is so flat. The river only has to rise a little bit before it spills its banks."
Yesterday the helicopter did not have to go far from Chibuto, a dry town on high land, before finding the first batch of desperate flood victims: 22 men, women, children and infants hanging onto a tree. All around were more trees littered with the debris of people who had once clung to them: cooking pots, clothes, chairs and tables. Thousands are feared dead.
It is painstaking work, getting these weakened, bewildered people-most of whom know little of life outside their primitive farming villages-to let go of their tree trunks and wade through chest-high water roiling under the helicopter's rotor blades toward the loud, hovering monsters.
While two of the South African soldiers knelt at the helicopter's door, beckoning to the paralyzed crowd and trying to convince them it was safe to approach, the pilot and co-pilot kept their eyes on surrounding trees. The rotor blades were within inches of the branches, but it was only by hovering within a foot of the water that soldiers could reach victims and haul them in.
One by one, they were dragged up by the arms and flopped, soaking, onto the floor of the helicopter like giant, exhausted fish. Some carried dripping bundles or bulging suitcases, everything they had managed to salvage. Many had infants strapped to their backs. All wore fatigued, wide-eyed looks and sat silently as the helicopter, filled to capacity, rose and headed to dry land. The soldiers left behind more people who would have to wait to be rescued later, but there is no way of knowing how many have not yet been spotted by rescue workers. So far, the South African military says it has picked up 9, 500 people.
This is the rainy season in Mozambique, so nobody was overly concerned when the rains began as usual in January and continued through February and into March. It wasn't until Cyclone Eline swept in from the Indian Ocean last Saturday and the waters from the already swollen Limpopo began pouring down from the north that the urgency of the situation became clear. Within 30 minutes, water levels had reached waist-level. Soon, entire villages were clambering atop the tiny round roofs of their hut-like homes and scrambling up the branches of the highest trees, bringing everything that was precious to them: TV sets, dogs, chickens, furniture. Their sheep and cattle were left behind and now stand pitifully on what tiny mounds of land they can find, unable to move forward or backward.
"In the past years, the water has come for two or three days. This year we thought it would be the same, but it was different," said 25-year-old Olga Matusse, who spent five days perched atop a school building with dozens of other people before being lifted into a helicopter and flown to dry land yesterday. A day earlier, a woman had given birth in a tree minutes before South African rescuers arrived and saved her and the infant.
But the South African military has been running the rescue operation virtually single-handedly with seven helicopters since Sunday, and aid workers say the rest of the world's response has been far short of what was needed to prevent a catastrophe.
"You have to ask the question, would the response have been different if this was a country of political interest to a large number of donor countries?" said Michelle Quintaglie of the United Nations' World Food Program.
Late Wednesday, the United States and other governments finally began stepping up their response. The United States said on Wednesday it would send soldiers, helicopters and small boats for search and rescue operations as well as six C-130 cargo planes. Britain said it was sending four helicopters and 100 motor boats and rafts to help.
UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan admitted the world had been too slow.
"We have got some response, but the response could have been better," he said. "I hope once the needs are further clarified the international community will respond and that those with the capacity to give will give and give generously."
Newsday (New York)
March 7, 2000, Tuesday
AWASH IN MUD AND MISERY / FLOODS RECEDE, WOES MOUNT
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Chokwe, Mozambique-The grass still lies flat where the river rushed over it, and the water lines are clearly visible about seven feet up the walls of every building in town. A short walk from the pastel pink church, a body lies in the middle of the muddy road, covered in branches and sheets and drawing flies in the wilting, 90-degree heat.
It draws no attention from the people nearby, who are busy trying to wash clothes in the soot-black water that sloshes around their knees. These people have seen just about everything since a wall of water poured through the city while most residents slept nine days ago and swallowed virtually everything in its path. The overflow from the flooded Limpopo River has receded enough for people to return to Chokwe, and what they're finding is a wasteland of mud, sludge and misery, where the smell of decaying bodies-38 were picked up yesterday-wafts down desolate side roads lined with sagging buildings and dotted with pools of murky, stagnant water.
It's a wonder anyone would come back here, but many of those who have returned say they had little choice. The camps set up for the estimated 251, 000 Mozambicans driven from their homes by last week's floods are overcrowded and lacking in drinking water and food, and thieves are stealing everything that isn't protected in Chokwe. Virtually every shop along Chokwe's main road has been emptied by looters who smashed the windows and tore off the burglar bars.
"They took my clothes and even my documents. I don't know why people take documents," said Shabir Patel, who lost his bakery's oven and 700 sacks of flour to the floods, and everything else to looters. "We have to come back now to protect whatever is left."
Like most who survived Chokwe's flood, Patel was roused from sleep around 1 a.m. on Feb. 27 by the sound of rushing water and screaming people running up the streets toward higher ground. "Someone was yelling, 'Water is coming! Water is coming!' You haven't time to take anything," said Patel, who threw his family into their car and drove away. Patel is spending nights at a camp for flood victims about 20 miles away, but each day he returns to Chokwe to sweep mud from his bakery and home and commiserate with neighbors.
Chokwe used to be a city of about 170,000, but there appears to be no more than a few thousand there now, and they must be among the worst-off of the 950,000 people who aid agencies say have been affected by Mozambique's floods. So desperate has the situation been in Chokwe that aid agencies, fearing riots if they tried to deliver food to the famished people, first dropped off heavily armed riot police Sunday to keep people from rushing at the supplies.
Yesterday, a helicopter brought in 10 tons of food, which is enough to feed only 5,000 people for one day, and then only in small "emergency survival rations," said Lindsey Davies of the World Food Program. An even bigger problem than food shortages, however, is the lack of clean water. Chokwe's residents are surrounded by water but have none that is safe to drink. They're so desperately thirsty, though, that they drink the brownish liquid anyway and give it to their children, a recipe for water-borne diseases such as cholera.
"There is no choice, no choice, no choice," Patel said as a group of women, most with infants hanging onto them, filled plastic jugs with water pouring from a broken pipe in the ruined municipal park, now a slimy wasteland where the plants are flattened and covered in mud. "It was beautiful here before. There was a garden."
One block away, Diogo Mucika was sloshing through the pond scum that surrounded his home. "My house is broken," he said, pointing at the sad- looking white house with its sludge-covered contents drying on the veranda. "My clothes-look at my clothes." They lay in a sodden heap in a wheelbarrow.
Even the hospital is ruined, its hallways a collection of wheelchairs and stretchers stuck in thick mud, and whose stench hints at hidden corpses. The hospital now is a makeshift setup being operated by the aid agency Doctors Without Borders, where scores of people-most of them weak-looking women with children-sat on dirty floors awaiting assistance. The biggest problem now is malaria, caused by mosquitos that thrive near water and fill the air each evening when the temperature cools down.
Disaster officials are relieved people are eager to return home and protect their property. "The last thing we want to do is set up camps. We hope people will go home soon," said Ross Mountain, the United Nations' special envoy for humanitarian affairs. At the same time, aid officials warned that the same people who are going home are also going to need help for months to come.
"The bottom line is, we're going to need a lot more food and a lot more money," said Davies, noting that the World Food Program has 8,000 tons of food in the country right now. "Eight-thousand tons is enough to last us the next few weeks, but we really see this as a much longer operation."
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